The central character of In Country is Samantha (played by Emily Lloyd), a restless teenager who’s bursting at the seams in her small Kentucky hometown. She lives with her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a Vietnam vet who has withdrawn from society.

Emmett’s no wild-eyed crazy; he’s just “mentally alienated,” according to his saucy niece. In the course of the movie, she comes to understand a bit more about his memories when she finds letters from her own father, who was killed in Vietnam before she was even born.

This is the core of the story, but the film also ranges over Samantha’s strained relationship with her mother (Joan Allen), who lives in another part of the state, her ho-hum feelings about her boyfriend (Kevin Anderson), whose neck is slightly red, and her concern over her best friend, who may be pregnant.

There’s nothing wrong with the film being rangy, but director Norman Jewison isn’t capable of covering that much ground. He’s barely able to make the uncle-niece relationship convincing, and it should be the heart of the movie, as Emmett is the surrogate for Samantha’s lost father. But Jewison’s notion of how to make this compelling is to stage a family argument during a thunderstorm, with loud cracks punctuating the conversation.

In his previous film, Moonstruck, Jewison had a delightful screenplay and he served it adequately. Here, the script (based on a book by Bobbi Ann Mason) has real possibilities, and some wonderful characters; Emmett’s vet buddies, for instance, are refreshingly free from caricature, and a doctor who sometimes provides companionship for Emmett is a funny character (and well played by Judith Ivey). But Jewison doesn’t have enough time to give to these people, and they get lost.

The story’s raggedness comes together in the finale at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., that once-maligned black slab that has become such a potent emotional touchstone. The tear-jerking ending, undeniably effective, felt manipulative to me. The memorial is such a powerful symbol, but is it supposed to cure all the characters’ problems?

Bruce Willis sheds his slick “Moonlighting” persona for the image-changing role of Emmett, and he plays the haunted vet with admirable restraint. Still there’s very little character for him to play, and Willis isn’t yet actor enough to suggest the unspoken subtleties of such a man. Emily Lloyd, who made a smashing debut in the English film Wish You Were Here, is an amazing raw talent whose emotions riot over hers expressive face. Like Willis, she doesn’t have enough to build a character with, and the film stays on a superficial level, with a walloping gut-punch at the end.

First published in the Herald, September 29, 1989

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Willis in “Moonlighting.” This was stretching too hard to be a change of pace, so he ended up looking a little forced, but it was an early indication of his future willingness to take different kinds of roles in different kinds of projects. Emily Lloyd has had her share of life problems, apparently, a real shame for anybody with a memory of Wish You Were Here.

Sunset is a moribund movie made by a collection of people who have an abundance of talent. How does a movie like this go wrong?

The most immediate answer is that the writer-director, Blake Edwards, has run out of gas. Edwards’ Hollywood career has been marked by unusual intelligence, which he applies to his favorite forms, slapstick and farce (10, Victor/Victoria). But Edwards seems to have lost his verve. Sunset crawls along with little conviction or life.

It’s a nifty idea for a movie. The conceit is that the cowboy movie star Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) would meet the real cowboy Wyatt Earp (James Garner), who’s been hired as a technical advisor for a Mix film. Then the two get involved in a murder mystery set among the golden movie people of 1920s Hollywood.

The crucial failing of the film is not that the murder plot is bad. It is, but that’s not so important. The big problem is that the relationship between Mix and Earp is utterly uninteresting. They hit if off immediately in a bland sort of way, and they remain in that mode for the entire film. There’s no development, no change, no interest.

Garner, the smooth old pro, is the most appealing element in the movie; his Earp is courtly, civilized, but takes no guff from anybody. Willis, however, is completely lost (and quite secondary to Garner). But it’s not so much his fault; the film simply gives him no character to play, so he walks around smirking and looking outrageous in his sequined cowboy suits and 20-gallon hats.

The supporting roles are played by good people who don’t have a lot to do: Mariel Hemingway is the owner of a brothel where the murder takes place; Malcolm McDowell is in nasty form as a sadistic studio head who used to be a baggy-pants clown known as the Happy Hobo; Patricia Hodge (the fine British actress from Betrayal) is his wife, Earl’s old flame; Kathleen Quinlan is a public relations person and the film’s liveliest performer.

It’s a puzzling film. One could believe that the movie was damagingly cut at some point, but even heavy cuts couldn’t excuse all of the lameness here. Unfortunately, Sunset sounds like an all-too-appropriate title for this stage in Edwards’ career.

First published in the Herald, April 1988

I seem to remember some talk about a writer’s strike that may have rushed this one into production, or maybe that’s just an excuse. A complete miscalculation, anyway, this movie. And, after Blind Date, a definitive botch of what should have been a useful collaboration between actor and director.

The Eighties on Film

This is a “diary” in movie reviews: the decade of the 1980s, written by a working critic who slogged through the weird, the cruddy, and even, occasionally, the some kind of wonderful. Some present-day annotation will provide hindsight, but otherwise these are the movies as they appeared: first impressions of Gymkata, the Police Academy pictures, the Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Norris oeuvre at its peak. I’ll start small but will keep a steady flow of reviews coming from my stash of yellowing clippings, even when the results embarrass me.

Here, ladies and gentlemen, are famous titles and oddities you have never freaking heard of. These are the children of Ronald Reagan and Lucinda Dickey. These are the damned. These are the 1980s, as they happened.